Overview

BittWare’s A10PED is a full-length PCIe x8 card featuring two Intel Arria 10 GX FPGAs. The Arria 10 boasts high densities and a power-efficient FPGA fabric married with a rich feature set including high-speed transceivers up to 15 Gbps, hard floating-point DSP blocks, and embedded Gen3 PCIe x8. The board offers flexible memory configurations, supporting a Hybrid Memory Cube along with up to 32 GBytes of memory. Two 12x Avago fiber optic modules and a QSFP cage provide high-speed, low-latency I/O direct to the FPGAs. The A10PED also incorporates a Board Management Controller (BMC) for advanced system monitoring, which greatly simplifies platform management. All of these features combine to make the A10PED ideal for a wide range of applications, including network processing and security, compute and storage, instrumentation, broadcast, and SigInt.

I/O Interfaces

The A10PED provides a variety of interfaces for high-speed serial I/O as well as debug support. Two 12x Avago fiber optic modules are on the front panel, supporting high-density, high-speed optical interconnects. A QSFP cage is also available on the front panel, supporting four 10GigE channels. The Avago and QSFP SerDes channels are connected directly to the Arria 10 FPGAs, thus removing the latency of external PHYs. The QSFP cage can optionally be adapted for SFP+.

Several additional interfaces also support high-speed I/O. Two Gen3 x8 PCIe interfaces connect to the FPGAs via 16 SerDes lanes, allowing for a x8 PCIe connection (to FPGA A) in a standard slot or two x8 interfaces (one to each FPGA)in a bifurcated slot. Two SerDes lanes are available via SATA connectors to connect external storage devices or provide direct board-to-board communication.

A USB 2.0 interface provides debug and programming support. The USB features a built-in Intel USB-Blaster and is connected to the Board Management Controller. The board also provides an on-board powered GPIO header.

Memory

The A10PED features four SODIMM sites, each supporting up to 8 GBytes of DDR4 with optional error-correcting codes (ECC). A Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) provides high-performance serial memory. Additional on-board memory includes flash with factory default and support for multiple FPGA images.

Board Management Controller

Boards in BittWare’s A10 family feature an advanced system monitoring subsystem, similar to those typically found on today’s server platforms. At the heart of the board’s monitoring system lies a Board Management Controller (BMC), which accepts Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) messaging protocol commands. The BMC provides a wealth of features, including control of power and resets, monitoring of board sensors, FPGA boot loader, voltage overrides, configuration of programmable clocks, access to I2C bus components, field upgrades, and IPMI messaging. Access to the BMC is via PCIe or USB. BittWare’s BittWorks II Toolkit also provides utilities and libraries for communicating with the BMC components at a higher, more abstract level, allowing developers to remotely monitor the health of the board.

BwMonitor in the BittWorks II Toolkit provides a view into the board management capabilities of your BittWare hardware.

Development Tools

BittWorks II Toolkit

BittWare offers complete software support for the A10PED with its BittWorks II software tools. Designed to make developing and debugging applications for BittWare’s boards easy and efficient, the Toolkit is a collection of libraries and applications that provides the glue between the host application and the hardware. A variety of features allow developers to take full advantage of the Arria 10 FPGA capabilities on the BittWare board, including FPGA control via PCIe, Flash programming, custom ISR scripts, and convenient control of FPGA loads. The Toolkit supports 64-bit Windows and Linux platforms and can connect to the board via PCIe or USB, providing a common API no matter the connection method.

FPGA Development Kit

BittWare’s FPGA Development Kit provides FPGA board support IP and integration for BittWare’s Intel FPGA-based boards. The FPGA DevKit includes FPGA components that provide preconfigured physical interfaces, infrastructure, and examples, drastically cutting development time and easily integrating into existing FPGA development environments.

Working example projects are available for each board which illustrate how to move data between the board’s different interfaces. Supported interfaces include DDR4, PCIe, 10GigE, LVDS, SerDes, and Double Data Rate I/O. All example projects are available on BittWare’s Developer Site.

BittWare Firmware and Network Solutions Partners

BittWare offers firmware for the Arria 10 FPGA on the A10 family PCIe boards, targeted specifically for networking applications. BittWare’s FPGA framework provides a solid base for your application, including the following:

10GigE MAC

PCIe multi-channel DMA engines

DDR4 SDRAM controllers

BittWare has also partnered with several companies to offer solutions for networking and financial acceleration: